Chapter 25: Symbiont of the Drunken Master_1

The learning speed of the symbiote was startling. Only a quick afternoon has passed since Shiller had replicated its ability, and the voice in his mind was now clearly communicating with him using brain waves. Although it could only communicate simple emotions, this in itself was already astounding.

After being able to communicate with the symbiote, Shiller began to experiment with his ability. He thought the symbiote was similar to Venom and expected to be enveloped by a sticky, viscous substance - complete with two big white eyes, a mouthful of fangs, and a long tongue - if he shouted "Mask!" as they did in the movie.

The symbiote was able to perceive Shiller's imagined scene directly and sent a series of brainwaves denying it. A sentence kept echoing in Shiller's mind:

"I'm not sticky, I'm not sticky, I'm not sticky..."

It seemed to be because it had sensed that Shiller didn't quite like the sticky sensation of the symbiote.

To be honest, Shiller didn't want to harm this newly-born little symbiote, as he knew it would later become his powerful assistant. Shiller didn't dislike the sticky texture of the symbiote; rather, he was more than a little resistant to it.

No matter how powerful the symbiote was, the disgusting feel of it, like a pile of mud, gave people the creeps.

Seemingly eager to prove that it was not sticky, the Gray mist, which had just learned to communicate and interact, controlled Shiller's body while he hadn't reacted. In a blink, Shiller found the world in front of him had changed.

He lost his eyes, or one could say he lost his whole physical body, and was now furnished with thousands of sensors.

Shiller found that he could suddenly feel every detail of everything in the clinic room. These signals constantly entered his brain, but those were not what he saw; instead, they were what he felt.

His vision wasn't so good as to clearly see the uneven details of each fiber in the quilt, but he could feel it now. At first, massive information from each sensor overwhelmed his brain. However, very quickly, the symbiote, another thinking organ, processed these data and fed them back to Shiller's brain. These exquisite details gave Shiller a sense of controlling everything.

Then, Shiller discovered that he seemed to be able to control this state. So, he began to deploy all the sensors as much as possible.

When these sensors extended to the floor mirror in the room, Shiller saw that he had changed into a pile of gray mist.

Yes, he lost his whole body and turned into an unpredictable mist.

Every particle in the mist turned into his sensor. Thousands of symbiotic factors quickly woven into a huge information collection network, not missing any detail. As long as a factor could enter, there would be no secrets from Shiller.

For example, Shiller could see the way iron elements were arranged in the electric kettle. If he concentrated, he could also feel the distribution of oxygen in the air and the existence of other rare gases. This microscopic ability to see all the way down to how atoms draw together made the world vast and wonderful, far beyond what Shiller as a human being could observe.

"Thank God, you're not that muddle-like symbiote," thought Shiller.

The Gray mist seemed to feel complimented; it sent out the feeling of great happiness. To further show off its power, it controlled Shiller to let the mist disperse.

The gray mist stopped congregating but spread out like ordinary fog. Soon, Hell's Kitchen was enveloped in a veil of haziness.

Many symbiotic particles became farther from each other, but they kept sending various information to Shiller's brain. As the range expanded, the amount of information rose exponentially. But with the symbiote helping him process, Shiller could focus his attention on a specific part. For example, he could feel the Mob fight happening several blocks away in the center of Hell's Kitchen.

He could even sense the path of every bullet in the crossfire.

He focused his attention, trying to find a bald man with a target pattern on his forehead.

The Gray mist locked onto him in a split second, even sending all the microscopic elemental information in his environment back to Shiller's brain.

This ability was impressively powerful; where the mist was, no one could escape Shiller's eyes.

Shiller felt that if it were his brain to process this vast array of information, he would have gone mad instantly. But this symbiote seemed to be born with such ability.

In the widespread fog, the information sent back by each particle could be categorized, filtered, and centralized at extremely high speed. In a very short process, as long as Shiller focused on what he wanted to know, he would naturally find out.

It was as if he was playing SimCity from God's perspective. He could observe all movements in the fog anytime. Any detail couldn't escape the penetration of the Gray mist.

Besides, this magical factor could penetrate into objects and destroy them internally, such as rupture a stable molecular structure and turn an object into dust in an instant.

However, the Gray mist told him that this ability only applied to things with stable molecular structures, and it wouldn't work if there was any interference from other forces.

But this was already a mighty power.

As he returned to human form, Shiller could choose to gather his body together in any place shrouded in fog. In other words, within the range covered by the gray fog, he could disappear from one place countless times and then suddenly appear in another.

However, this could not completely replace Flash's power, because turning into gray fog, spreading out, condensing, and then converting back into human form required a certain amount of time, which was not as fast as Flash's ability.

With the situation in the Marvel universe temporarily settled, Daredevil Matt was in the process of recovering, and Little Spider was keen to follow Stark and learn how to be a superhero. Unfortunately, he had his final exams coming up and had to catch up with his missed coursework. He didn't have much time to wander around. Nick Fury's constant nagging was bothering Stark, who had been hiding in his lab tinkering with mecha suits most of the time. Thus, Shiller took a nap and returned to the DC World.

Shortly after returning to DC, Shiller discovered an annoying aspect about the symbiote inside him.

Back in the DC World, Shiller was organizing his gear. Jonathan's arrest meant that not much fear gas was left, but luckily he had previously swept through Jonathan's entire stock. The remaining fear gas he had was a concentrated, high-quality product.

He started to dilute the remaining fear gas to fill into spray bottles for his use.

The fear gas had no effect on Shiller, so unlike Jonathan, he didn't need to completely cover himself while experimenting. The only two living creatures in his apartment, Shiller and Pikachu, weren't affected by the fear gas, so he didn't care about leakage during experiments.

Furthermore, he did not have any education in chemistry. So while diluting, he probably broke about two hundred lab rules per minute. Light offenses included not wearing gloves or a gas mask, so each time he finished, the room would be blurred with a low concentration of fear gas.

It was the same this time. After going through a series of extremely unstandardized chemical dilution operations, Shiller barely managed to fill different spray bottles with the fear gas. However, at this moment, he began receiving a series of excited signals in his brain.

"This is delicious. This is delicious. This is delicious. This is delicious. Give it to me. Let me eat. Let me eat. Eat. Eat. Eat. Eat..."

Shiller was taken aback. Was the symbiote saying that the fear gas was tasty?

He suddenly remembered the comic book explanation of the symbiote, especially Venom. The reason Venom could eat chocolate instead of human brains was because both contained something called "phenylethylamine."

This was a chemical compound that could excite the human brain and was found in both the human brain and chocolate.

Could the fear gas contain it too?

Shiller thought it was indeed possible. The fear gas could trigger the deepest fears in people's minds and suddenly activate their negative emotions. It was hard to say whether Jonathan had used this chemical compound when producing the poison gas.

It seemed not only that he had used it, but he had also used quite a lot of it.

"How do you want to eat it?" Shiller asked the symbiote in his brain.

The symbiote seemed unsure; it only knew that the substance in front of it was very appealing. Shiller had no choice; he took a bottle of diluted fear gas and sprayed it directly at his nose.

He immediately felt the symbiote in his brain getting excited, continuously yelling in his mind: "Delicious, delicious, delicious, delicious, not enough, not enough, not enough, not enough, want more, want more, want more, want more…"

Okay, Shiller thought, the appetites of symbiotes must all be big. He took out a small bottle of undiluted, still-liquid fear gas and drank it directly.

The substance itself didn't taste like anything, but within an instant, he could feel the symbiote inside of him getting so mutually excited that it was slightly disoriented.

It transmitted a long string of brainwaves to Shiller that he couldn't understand, then it began using all the words it had just learned to yell frantically in his mind.

Finally, after a while, a type of fog that was denser than the usual gray fog and was slightly black began to fill the air around Shiller. Shiller took a sniff. It seemed like it might be fear gas.

Okay, Shiller thought, it seemed that for the symbiote, a high concentration of fear gas was like liquor. It had gotten the Gray Mist drunk.

Moreover, when the symbiote was drunk, its reactions were somewhat similar to a human's. First, it had a frenzy, talking a lot of nonsense, and then it vomited.

The fog surrounding Shiller was likely what the Gray Mist had vomited up after getting drunk.

The Gray Mist recovered pretty quickly, but once it had, it still wanted to ask Shiller for more "liquor," and was sternly denied.

But it was obviously not discouraged and kept buzzing in Shiller's mind, appearing aggrieved.

Reluctantly, Shiller mused, why had his symbiote turned into a drunkard?